Community college supporters are hoping a little hand-holding will boost donations to a statewide scholarship fund.

Organizers are trying to persuade at least a million Californians to join hands April 17 in a line stretching from Sacramento, through the Bay Area and south to San Diego. Several celebrities are expected to attend the Hands Across California event, including MC Hammer, Ryan Seacrest and Ed Begley Jr.

Although the route has been in a state of flux, it will span at least 1,000 miles, a length that has presented its share of challenges, said Paul Lanning, president and CEO of the Foundation for California Community Colleges.

“One of the challenges is staying off the freeway,” he said. “And California, of course, is a state built on freeways.”

Last month’s catastrophic tsunami in Japan also led organizers to move the route away from the California coast, Lanning said.

The event is part of a last-minute push to raise millions of dollars for an endowment established in 2008 to fund scholarships to low-income students. The San Francisco-based Bernard Osher Foundation had pledged at the time to match half of each donation to the fund — up to $25 million — received by June 30.

Organizing the human chain is Ken Kragen, a longtime music-industry manager who helped organize the 1985 We Are the World and 1986 Hands Across America charity events. Kragen said he is relying on the Internet and cellphones — which did not exist in the mid-1980s — to attract participants.

“We don’t have huge numbers of people signed up, but we didn’t 25 years ago either,” he said.

Using a model that has raised millions for disaster relief, people can text-message a donation to the Osher endowment. The public can text “hands” to 27722 to donate $10.

Organizers are hoping many of the people standing in the 1,000-mile line will text donations, Kragen said.

“If you don’t do something that has that wow factor, you don’t get people’s attention,” he said. “Once you do, you can get people to text in that moment.”

The route will run along both sides of San Francisco Bay and will include the campuses of Contra Costa, Berkeley City, Merritt, Skyline, Chabot, San Mateo and Foothill colleges, among others.